When I was a child one of the odder television commercials was for a brand of shampoo called Prell. They would show some pretty people lathering up with the product and at the end they would show the bottle of green shampoo and a hand would drop a pearl into it which would very slowly head towards the bottom as the commercial ended. I never understood what a pearl falling through shampoo had to do with anything. I admit it was a neat visual which has stuck with me probably fifty years after I first encountered it. What is interesting is a dense solid object with character slowly descending through a thick intensely colored liquid carried a contrast which was evident to my child’s eye. The new perfume from Hiram Green called Slowdive got me thinking about that.

First, let me get this out of the way; Slowdive does not smell of shampoo or pearls. I don’t suspect this is a theme Mr. Green is interested in exploring. It certainly isn’t anything I’m overtly interested in smelling either. What has me thinking of Prell shampoo is Mr. Green has taken a container of honey and dropped a figurative pearl of tobacco flower into that. Slowdive is the slow evolution as those two ingredients continually interact while Mr. Green surrounds it with a fascinating choice of supporting ingredients.

Hiram Green

From the beginning the honey is there in a quite concentrated form. Mr. Green manages to make it thick without enhancing some of the less desirable character of honey as a perfume ingredient in high concentration. Then he takes his tobacco flower and drops it onto the surface. As it first appears it gains a bit of traction over the honey. Once it begins to sink a little beneath the surface a dried fruit accord cuts across the combination of narcotic sweetness; amplifying the latter nature. This might be a place where those who aren’t so fond of sweet in their fragrance might have some issues. The next phase, as the tobacco flower drifts lower in the honey, coalesces around orange blossom and tuberose. If you see that and think, “white flower explosion” it is much more restrained than that. The orange blossom is a typical kind of honey flavoring and it intersperses itself as grace note with that in mind. The tuberose takes the tobacco into a deeper place using its own narcotic quality to add to it. As the tobacco flower reaches the bottom a group of resinous notes await it as a resting place completing the slowdive.

Slowdive has 10-12 hour longevity and above average sillage. This is an easy perfume to overspray which can have an impact on how much you enjoy wearing it.

Slowdive is another fantastic perfume from Hiram Green. Working from an all-natural palette it consistently amazes me the power he extracts from these. It is becoming a signature of his, after four releases. This time Slowdive allows the wearer the opportunity to luxuriate in the glory of a tobacco shaped pearl slowly falling through honey. I don’t know if that represents quality anymore than the Prell commercial did but in this case, it should.